Positive securement of the rear end of a truck vehicle against a loading dock or the like is essential in avoiding serious problems and mishaps occurring during loading or unloading of a truck vehicle parked at a loading dock. Without proper securement, there is a real potential hazard in the truck vehicle inadvertently moving away from the dock while goods are being loaded on or removed from the truck bed by lift trucks or the like.
Heretofore, one effort to avoid such a potential hazard has been to utilize wheel blocks placed on the roadway beneath the truck and wedged against the front of the rear tires. Such a practice, however, is undesirable for one or more of the following reasons: (a) the blocks may become lost or damaged; (b) the roadway surface may be slippery due to spilled oil, rain, snow or ice and thus impair effectively wedging the blocks against the tires; and (c) the blocks are awkward to handle and sometimes difficult to remove from a wedged position.
Other attempts to obtain proper securement of the truck vehicle to the loading dock have involved the use of elaborate mechanisms which are of costly and complex construction, interfere with access to and from the truck bed, are not readily capable of being utilized with a wide variety of truck vehicle designs, and require an external source of pneumatic and/or hydraulic pressure in order to enable the mechanisms to opeate properly.